Lots of people will see the phrase “May 1st Reboot” and not know what it means. To paraphrase, the reboot was a yearly event (that skipped a few years here and there) that gave designers a chance to participate in a global renewal of the creative web by simultaneously shutting down and relaunching their sites over the course of a month. My first “reboot” was in 2004, and it became a great source of motivation to give Avalonstar a facelift.

I figure, “reboot” is the best way to title this post, given the date. That said, it’s funny that I’m writing this on May 1st. Equally humorous is the fact that I’ve rebooted with a site that isn’t 100% complete. I guess some things never change! Technically, Avalonstar changed on March 1st, albeit also in an unfinished state.

But let’s back up a bit.

A Chance to Change

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you know that I am a big fan of nostalgia. In a life in which I hold myself to unreasonable expectations, seeing how far I’ve come from a given point in time always manages to put a smile on my face. That was no different for 2020, or what would be this domain’s 20th year. I had contracted an amazing designer to help me reimagine Avalonstar’s brand in 2019, but avalonstar.com stayed stubbornly dormant. The last entry I had written here was three weeks into my tenure at Twitch in 2014, along with a couple of entries thrown on Medium.

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Avalonstar in 2020

The last version of this site was built in Middleman, a Ruby-based static site generator. Over the years, I’ve transitioned from Python to Node, experimented with frameworks like Ember, and currently create Twitch overlays in React. Returning to Avalonstar, I wanted to use tools I was comfortable with and settled on Gatsby.

I explored headless CMS solutions and initially used Netlify CMS, but later switched to Sanity.io. Sanity’s model-based schema felt familiar and offered a great full-screen writing experience.

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Rebooted

If you’ve gotten this far, welcome (back) to Avalonstar. It’s good to meet you!